Running a marathon at the top of the world — for cleaner air in China
“In the first section of the race, which was 20 miles or so, the snow was about a foot deep. The second part was about 6 miles — and the snow was even deeper. The terrain became very uneven with the footsteps of the other runners that came before me. And then, because it’s -41 C, everything freezes over immediately. So every time your foot hits the ground, you don’t know what to expect.” — Xibei Li
Even though his surroundings were miserably frigid and mentally exhausting, the North Pole air was clean and crisp, which served as a good reminder to Xibei Li about why he was putting himself through this.
He was doing all of this to help people breathe cleaner air.
Xibei says the North Pole Marathon is the hardest thing he’s ever done. And this is coming from a guy who’s finished a marathon on all seven continents.
According to race organizer Richard Donovan, “The biggest challenges [of the North Pole Marathon] are the underfoot conditions and the extreme cold. I also have to consider the threat of a polar bear attack and there are armed guards on location to deal with such an eventuality. Furthermore, there is no land at the North Pole, competitors are running on an ice floe on top of the ocean, so I must also make a course that avoids breaks in the ice that expose the ocean below.”
Polar bears. Ice floes. Guns. This is clearly a race for a certain type of person. A person with a strong will who likes a challenge. And Xibei fits the bill.
Originally from a provincial city in the Northern part of China, Xibei Li, 30, came to the United States for graduate studies at Carnegie Mellon University. He earned his master’s degree in Information Systems and moved to New York City, but soon found himself out of shape and just feeling a bit blah. So in 2012 he started running as a way to feel healthier.
But what may have started as a solitary pursuit for self-improvement has blossomed into something much bigger. He has begun using his adventure marathoning to help provide clean air for people back in China.
Xibei recalls that while growing up in China it was a luxury to see a blue sky — and that its only gotten worse since he left.
“The dire conditions literally took my breath away when I visited my hometown last year. The air smelled like it was on fire, smoky and thick with ash, a toxic haze that enveloped the entire city.”
People across China are exposed to this type of toxic environment on a daily basis. One report says that 4,000 people die every day in China as a result of the air pollution. And while commercial air purifiers can help lessen the health impacts, they cost hundreds of dollars — often unaffordable for the people that need it most.
Appalled by the rapidly deteriorating situation, Xibei started researching what he could do and came across Blue Sky Lab, a program of Friends of Nature, China’a oldest environmental NGO.
What particularly caught his eye was how they taught kids from low-income families to assemble DIY air purifiers for home use.
Amazingly, it only costs $34 in materials to assemble a DIY air purifier — which is 1/10 the cost of some of the cheapest commercial air purifiers.
He learned that for each of these DIY air purifiers, a family of three could breathe purer air, which in turn would reduce the whole family’s risk of stroke, heart disease, lung cancer and other respiratory diseases.
It was around this time that Xibei was contemplating registering for the North Pole Marathon — but now he had a real reason to do it. He was going to run in the coldest marathon on earth and raise money to improve the lives of families back home while doing it.
So as he trained for his impending sub-zero run, he launched a CrowdRise fundraising page and reached out to everyone he knew asking for support. As Xibei wrote on his fundraiser page, “I would like to use this once-in-a-lifetime race as an opportunity to raise awareness for an all-too-commonplace environmental problem affecting developing countries — urban air pollution.”
Xibei quickly raised thousands of dollars — from donors all over the world.
Based on the success of his fundraiser, Blue Sky Lab also began looking at how they could improve air quality on a larger scale. This led them to begin training students to assemble air purifiers for use in their own classrooms in rural public schools — fostering an interest in science, technology and public health along the way. Thanks to the money Xibei crowdfunded, they just recently finished training and installation at the first location. And the waiting list continues to get longer, with six schools — totaling nearly 2,500 students and faculty — already signed up.
The money Xibei raised has already provided over 180 families and dozens of schoolchildren in China the chance to breathe clean air.
Now, with a successful fundraiser behind him and a ton of support to take with him, it was time for Xibei to accomplish his mission — running 26.2 miles in one of the coldest and harshest locales on earth. So he hopped on a plane from New York to Norway and ventured north to Longyearbyen Svalbard, a town 1,300km inside the Arctic Circle, before finally touching down on an ice runway at Barneo Camp in the North Pole.
At points during the race, like when Xibei found himself out-of-view of any other human or when he fell victim to the oscillating combination of fiery heat (from the sweat pooling inside his many layers) and extreme cold (from everything else) — quitting crept into his mind. But then he’d recall who and what he was running for, and this pushed him all the way to the finish line.
“It’s not like you go to the very cold environment to torture yourself. You’re doing something. You know you’re going to make a difference. That motivated me whenever I wanted to give up. I came all this way and I’m raising money. I’m not just running for myself, I’m running for people that I’m going to help and for people who donated.”
With marathons on all seven continents and the North Pole under his belt, Xibei has set a pretty high standard for himself. But there’s always a new challenge out there. So next year he’s thinking about doing the Everest Marathon, the world’s highest at 17,000 feet above sea level, and thinking about raising more money for the cause in the process.
So if Xibei soon finds himself gasping for air in the Himalayas, he’ll know that he’s doing it so that people in China won’t have to do the same.
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